New America Media

Sandy Close has made it her life’s work to find and amplify unique voices from different ethnic communities, especially those of the young. For nearly 50 years, Pacific News Service and its successor, New America Media, practiced “journalism from the inside out” by bringing people from many cultures into the newsroom. Last fall, Close had to shutter her organization, but her legacy lives on in dozens of professional journalists who got their start with her.

A majority of California residents have never heard about the state’s landmark cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gas emissions from industry, a survey from the Public Policy Institute of California shows. While 54 percent of state residents sampled had heard nothing about the new multibillion-dollar carbon market, 33 percent had heard a little and 12 percent a lot, the survey, which was released July 31, found.

California is reliably “blue” — Barack Obama carried the state by 23 points in the last election — largely because of the rise of ethnic voters, a new survey by the Field Poll found. “This hasn’t always been the case,” said the poll’s director, Mark DiCamillo. Republicans won seven of the nine elections between World War II and 1982, when the state became solidly Democratic in federal elections. “The main reason for it is because of the growth of ethnic population.”

The story of Lakireddy Balireddy made international headlines in the early 2000s, but what happened in the decade since then was even more important, said reporter Viji Sundaram of New America Media and part of a team project on human trafficking in the Spring 2012 print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.

Last Saturday, prior to the thousands-strong march of Wall Street protestors attempting to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, which ended in some 700 arrests, the first edition of The Occupied Wall Street Journal hit New York City’s streets. Within three days, all 50,000 copies had been snapped up and distributed by volunteers throughout the five boroughs, leading to another print run Tuesday ahead of the paper’s second edition, which comes out Friday. The Journal, a 4-page weekly broadsheet funded entirely through online contributions at Kickstarter.com, is the latest manifestation of a social media-driven movement that is growing in real body numbers and gaining national momentum.

Some economists and business groups say the Great Recession is over, but how do communities really know whether they're moving out of the recession or falling behind?

A ground-breaking new tool that measures the real-world impact of the recession is providing answers. It shows that in San Francisco, at least, the worst downturn in 70 years isn’t just continuing — it may be getting worse.

The new San Francisco Distress Index, which assembles 11 types of monthly economic indicators such as foreclosure rates and food pantry visits, has risen 11 percent since June 2009 — the month when, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. recession supposedly bottomed out.

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